An Unlikely Story
by Selene2
Summary: Could Severus Snape actually be capable of feeling or recieving love? It certainly seems that a new TA has found her way into his heart...
1. The Sheep and the Sheapherd

It was cold and pouring down rain at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as Severus Snape sat in his dungeon office, a fire blazing to his back and raindrops pelting his half buried window. A teacher's assistant. How could Dumbledoor do this to him? Was it not enough that he had been denied the Defense Against the Dark Arts job for so many years? Was it really necessary to add insult to injury by sticking him with a bright eyed bushy tailed nauseatingly happy twenty one year old girl who would be following his every move and interrupting his classes? It was not the first time Snape had wondered if his life could possibly go any more wrong. As he sat with his head in his palm, eyeing a book without reading it, he heard a rap at his thick wooden door.  
  
"What is it," Snape spat without looking up.  
  
"It's Dumbledoor, Severus. I've come to shepherd you up to the start of term banquet."  
  
'I regret to inform you that I will be unable to attend your charming gala. But here's an idea. Why don't you have my new assistant represent me?"  
  
As Snape was speaking, Dumbledoor had opened the door without being invited and helped himself to a seat across the way from Snape's mahogany desk. "Severus, will you ever outgrow these temper tantrums? I brought Selene here to help you, as well as to remove her from a perilous situation."  
  
"Headmaster, I doubt that anything could be as perilous as being appointed to me against my will."  
  
"I'll not have threats, Severus."  
  
"You know I'm only half serious."  
  
"It makes no difference. I'll leave it up to Selene to tell you the details of her past if she wishes, but for now suffice it to say that the things that you're 'only half serious' about are things that others have been all too serious about. Selene has had a hard go of it Severus, and you will do well to remember that she is to be treated with the utmost respect."  
  
Snape sulked at these words. Although his interest was piqued – what exactly had happened to this girl that had been so terrible – he was incensed at having to treat anyone with respect. At this rate she'd be treated better than anyone who had ever had the misfortune of crossing his path.  
  
"Do I make myself clear," Dumbledoor asked, his voice full of intent.  
  
"Most certainly," Snape answered sulkily.  
  
"Very well then," Dumbledoor concluded, his spirits immediately lifted. "Off we go then."  
  
"Off we go. Woo hoo," Snape muttered to himself. 


	2. A Blotched Introduction

Snape slipped into the great hall just as the first years were making their way, wide eyed, up the stairs toward his destination. He breezed past the house tables up to the high table with Dumbledoor in tow. His eyes flicked towards his seat. That's when he saw her. She sat with her face towards the table and her hands wringing fretfully in her lap. Her long blonde hair covered her face on the side facing him when he sat down, but on the other side was tucked behind her ear. As Dumbledoor passed her she looked up imploringly and said in a whisper of a voice, "sir?"  
  
"Yes dear? What can I do to make you more comfortable?"  
  
"Please let me sit somewhere other than up here."  
  
"Selene, I would be delighted to let you sit wherever you want for any other meal, but for this particular feast, I need you with the rest of the faculty so that the students can recognize you as a teacher."  
  
"Yessir," Selene answered, her hands still wringing and her face returning it's downward gaze. Dumbledoor gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder before moving toward his own seat and beginning the sorting ceremony. All through the ceremony, Snape watched carefully to see when Selene would look up. She didn't remove her stare from the table for even a second. Though he was still irked at the thought of an assistant, he thought to himself that someone must have done a real number on her to make her this reticent. When the food appeared on the table, Snape assumed that she would gobble down mounds of it to make up for her obvious malnutrition. He was further confounded by the fact that she took quarters of servings of everything, only after being offered, and merely rearranged them on her plate to make it look as if she had eaten some.  
  
This was an inferiority complex such as Snape had never seen. He knew that to her it seemed justified. Despite himself, however, he could not help feeling a little indignant at the fact that someone had taken such an angelic looking young woman and broken her so intensively. It had been a long time since he had looked at a woman and felt attracted to her. It had been years in fact. Not since Lily had he felt this way about a girl…He immediately pushed those memories back into the corners of his mind. He had vowed long ago to forget that part of himself. As far as he was concerned, love was a lost cause to him.  
  
He decided that he should start treating this young girl just as he had treated everyone else since his days at Hogwarts. He leaned close to her, making her start visibly but not turn her face towards his. She seemed to be avoiding this at all costs. "I daresay, dear, that if you continue to act as skittish as this you'll be the most walked upon teacher in this school."  
  
Her eyes darted toward his for the slightest fraction of a second, and when they did the sheet of hair that had been covering the side of her face brushed backwards, revealing the darkest and angriest looking bruise Severus had ever seen. He was startled, if only for a second. The bruise had run from her eye all the way to her jaw. It wasn't one big bruise, really, but a series of them, which covered the entire left side of her face. Perhaps she did deserve an extra measure of kindness and a little less of his characteristic sarcasm. "My apologies." The words had to be choked out of him as they had been obscured for so many years. "My name is Snape. You're to be my assistant. Please, accompany me to my office after this ridiculous affair so that we can acquaint ourselves."  
  
"Yessir," Selene whispered breathily from behind her wall of flaxen hair. 


	3. A Friendship Begins

As the feast drew to a close and the students began their journeys to their dormitories, Snape escorted Selene to his dungeon office. He opened the door, ushering her through, and offered her a seat before pointing his wand at the ashen fireplace and muttering the word 'incendio'. Her face, still hidden by that stubborn pane of hair, looked even more brutalized by the light of the fire. Her narrowness was accentuated a thousand times by the way the shadows danced across her pointed cheekbones and overly large lips. He studied her as he made his way to the chair beside her, and concluded that with a little mass added to her lithe frame she could be astoundingly beautiful. He cursed himself for his soft thoughts.  
  
He sat beside her in an overstuffed easy chair, uncharacteristic for a room of Severus Snape's, and turned to speak to her. "Selene, I don't know what you've been through, but it's obviously been very trying for you. I want you to know something, though, here and now. You're allowed to look at me. From now on I shall demand it."  
  
Selene slowly raised her head to match his, but cleverly averted her gaze to the bookcase behind him. He decided that it was a start. "As you most likely already know, I am the potions master here. Albus told me that you were quite adept at potions."  
  
"Yessir."  
  
"That's another thing, Selene. You need not address me as sir. Professor Snape or simply Professor will do. I'd offer to have you call me Severus but I'm confident that you wouldn't do it anyway." At this Selene blushed visibly, and it did incredible wonders to the pallor of her face.  
  
"Yes Professor."  
  
"Tell me about your experience."  
  
The prospect of speaking more than a pair of words to anyone seemed to visibly agitate Selene, but she began bravely. "I was a student at Azylum, a wizarding school in New England. I was a prefect, graduated with honors. I was offered a position as potions master there, which I accepted. I met a man…" at this, Selene began to trail off.  
  
"Please continue."  
  
"I met a man. He taught Dark Arts. The more I got to know him the more control he had. I escaped to England, he pursued me. Luckily, the headmaster at the school where I taught wrote to Dumbledoor explaining my position and he took me in."  
  
"Indeed. I meant for you to tell me about your experience in potions, but that's quite alright."  
  
"I'm sorry sir."  
  
"Professor."  
  
"Professor." Selene regained her breathy whisper.  
  
"So I should be addressing you as professor as well, then."  
  
"I'm not a professor, sir."  
  
"But you were. Once a teacher always a teacher, in my experience. It's not a lifestyle that you fall out of."  
  
"You fall out of many things over the years, in my experience."  
  
"Indeed. Am I to deduce that this is all you wish to tell me about your past?" A natural bond was growing between the two. It seemed that all he had to do was pull her out of her shell little by little and she would warm up to him, one timid glance after another.  
  
"Am I to deduce that that is not quite all you wish to hear?"  
  
"Undeniably."  
  
'What do you want to know?"  
  
"Everything." 


	4. Selene's Story

"I grew up in Maine in a comfortable house by the shore. My mother reared me. My father passed on when I was five. I don't remember him. My mother was kind and caring. She sent me to school at Azylum when I was eleven. She was a witch, of course. My father was a wizard as well. I excelled in my studies because I was shunned by the other students. I was a know it all, in their eyes. Too good for my own good. There was nothing else for me to do, so I spent all my free time in the library or in my dormitory. I became obsessed with success in school. Graduation with honors was my all-consuming goal. Not surprisingly to anyone, I got it. As I said, I was offered the position as potions master at Azylum. I took it, and I taught for a year before I met the dark arts professor, Mr. Jageilo.  
  
"It didn't take long before he and I were seeing quite a lot of each other. Everyone thought we were dating, including him. He was quite let down when I told him that I thought we should take a break from our nightly meetings in the staff room. I had become frightened of him. All he ever seemed to want to talk about was the dark arts. Personally, I began to find him morbid. He was too interested. His specialty was torture. He spent a year studying the forms of torture commonly used in the witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The last straw, though, was when he wanted to start turning ours into a…well, a physical relationship. When I told him no he became irate. He told me that if I hadn't been interested I should not have strung him along. He said that I was rightfully his and that if he couldn't have me then no one else should either. I put a protective charm on my doors and windows that night and wrote a letter explaining myself to the headmaster of Azylum. I spent the entire evening packing my things and then I left the following day before dawn.  
  
"I sought refuge at my aunt's house in Ipswich. I was there only two days and into the third night when he showed up pounding on the doors and windows. How he found me I'll never know. In any case, my aunt did not see it necessary to put extra security on the house. 'How would he ever find you here,' she asked me. He burst in, and before I could even reach for my wand he had annihilated my aunt, her husband, and my cousin who was only twelve. It would have been merciful for him to kill me. Instead, he performed the stunning spell. When I came to I was completely disoriented. I had been blindfolded and taken to a cabin somewhere in the middle of the forest. My shoes had been taken so that I couldn't run. I was locked in the house when Jageilo left. The windows were nailed shut. I had never learned how to disapparate. Jageilo knew it. And so I was bound to him through my own inability to escape.  
  
"Needless to say, he wasn't happy with me for leaving him behind and running away. At first I cursed him. I told him he'd never get away with it, that the Ministry of Magic would find him out and send him straight to Azkaban. I soon learned that he was supremely stronger than myself, and that he usually felt the need to demonstrate his power when I mouthed back to him. He could have done a lot worse to me, but his favorite punishment was hitting. He loved to hit. Especially around the head. Of course, when he tired of hitting he was quite fond of burning, cutting, and…well…lets just say that he's guilty of more than one occasion of rape.  
  
Snape's breath visibly caught in his throat at the last word. "I had no idea." It was his turn to speak in a voice barely above a whisper. "I don't know what to say."  
  
"You don't have to say anything. I'm not telling you this for sympathy."  
  
"How did you get away from him?"  
  
"Good question. He left one day and just didn't come back. I assumed he met some sort of detainment, because he was only meant to go to the lake and back. It was a mile's walk both ways. It should have taken no longer than an hour and a half. I waited for two days. The only reason I waited so long was that I had learned before the punishment for trying to escape."  
  
Half afraid to ask, Snape cleared his throat and posed his question. "And what was that?"  
  
Selene stood and undid the hooks and eyes on her robes revealing a thin cotton shirt underneath. She lifted the hem of the shirt to reveal countless slashes which were slowly making their way from scabs to scars. When she was satisfied that Snape had seen enough of her cuts she redid her robes and lifted the sleeves to reveal a multitude of burn scars. Snape nearly felt a lump in his throat. "Can't you see someone about having them healed? Madam Pomfrey can heal anything."  
  
"Not these. Jageilo cursed me before he even began. No scar on my body may ever be healed. He didn't want to kill me. He wanted to torture me. And he made sure that I would never forget it."  
  
"You waited for two days. Then what?"  
  
"Then I smashed the window out."  
  
"That seems awfully simple. Why hadn't you just done it before."  
  
"Because I was under the Imperius Curse."  
  
"But that's an unforgivable curse."  
  
"I understand that. In any case, after two days of Jageilo being gone I began to come out of it. I simply smashed the window and ran for it. The first place I came to was a rural farm. The master of the house was afraid of me because of my appearance and my clothes. And so I wandered, and I wandered, and I wandered. Eventually I was lucky enough to come to a wizarding family who recognized me from the story in the Daily Prophet. Apparently Dumbledoor had placed the article in hopes that someone would find me. They called Dumbledoor immediately, and he brought me here. The end." 


End file.
